this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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I feel like I hear this claim pretty often here, but did it really? Pretty much all the early Karen stuff I can find are the she took the kids/can I speak to a manager/vaccines cause autism angles.
Various names have been used as ‘white women calling cops on black people nicknames’.
6 major incidents in 2018 alone. But a 2020 viral incident that got ‘Karen’ to stick.
Since then it’s been almost entirely “Karen” and like “woke” and so many other appropriations of Black culture, has been taken from original anti-racist meaning to just be another misogynistic term for “disliked woman” or “man acting like an entitled woman”.
People were absolutely using “Karen” amongst a few other names for the entitled white woman stereotype, but the catalyst for standardising “Karen” was specifically about the racist Central Park Karen video viral. Around that time and George Floyd and BLM summer riots. The peak “Karen” was about BLM against racist white women. And it has since been watered down like a lot of the energy of the summer of 2020.
As this graph shows, “Karen haircut” peaked during the 2020 summer of BLM.
I could have sworn it was being thrown around earlier than that. Like, around 2014 or 15
Yeah, it came from a meme about the Nintendo Switch reveal ad which came out in 2016.
EDIT: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nintendo-switch-karen